Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Morgan Griffith on the Green Climate Fund

From Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter:

"The Green Climate Fund and Us Recently, I spearheaded a letter to House Appropriations Committee leaders signed by 110 Members of the House in which we expressed our opposition to President Obama’s unilateral pledge of U.S. taxpayer funds for use in the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. This fund, launched in 2009 with the goal of raising $100 billion a year in financing, is a fund intended to help developing nations catch up with the U.S. in addressing climate change.

Despite serious domestic budget constraints, as well as Congress never having authorized money for the Green Climate Fund, President Obama unilaterally – on his own, without it having been authorized by those of us in Congress – pledged $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer funding for it.

This is significant, because when President Obama is promising billions of dollars for other nations, those nations ought to be aware that money may not actually be there.

Also troubling, as we noted in our letter, is that, “The United Nations’ top climate change official, Christina Figueres, has described the current goal of $100 billion as ‘peanuts’ and envisions trillions of dollars in spending over the next 15 years.” If the U.N. expects to spend trillions, you can be sure that they will expect the U.S. to pony up a significant portion of those trillions. And by “U.S.,” they mean you and me. In other words: Us.

This week, my colleagues and I in the House will be considering the North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act (H.R. 8) as well as two resolutions disapproving of President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency rules for new and existing power plants.

Conversely, President Obama and other world leaders arrived in Paris in recent days for the 2015 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, at which it is expected the Green Climate Fund will be discussed.

We can debate whether or not we ought to be spending American taxpayer dollars to help our economic competitors, putting our nation further in debt in the process. But the Administration certainly shouldn’t do so without first receiving the approval of Congress and, by extension, the people of the U.S.
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